Posts tagged tv

Furniture maker IKEA commissioned a research organization to interview 11,000 parents and children in 25 countries in Europe, North America, Australia, and East Asia to find out their thoughts on children, families, and play (Facebook, PDF). I'd have loved to compare results for the rest of the world too, but I guess there aren't as many IKEAs there.

Children overwhelmingly prefer playing with their friends and parents over watching TV.
When children across the world were asked to choose between watching TV or playing with friends or parents, they overwhelmingly choose to play with friends (89%) and parents (73%) with TV a very poor substitute for social interaction at only 11%.

Nearly half of the parents think play should be educational. Children disagree.
Nearly half (45%) of all parents think that play is best when it’s educational. This rises to two thirds of parents in China, Slovakia, Czech Rep, Spain, Hungary, Russia, Poland and Portugal. A further minority at 17% (China, Italy, Russia and US) actually prefer their children to learn things rather than to simply play. 27% think play should always have a purpose. As for the children, 51% actually prefer to play rather than learn.

Introducing television to an area can shift the horizons of the possible radically and quickly, especially for women. It's worth noting that both the positive and negative consequences recorded in this study were by and large unintended and unforeseen.

Cable and satellite television may be having an even bigger impact on fertility in rural India. As in Brazil, popular programming there includes soaps that focus on urban life. Many women on these serials work outside the home, run businesses, and control money. In addition, soap characters are typically well-educated and have few children. And they prove to be extraordinarily powerful role models: Simply giving a village access to cable TV, research by scholars Robert Jensen and Emily Oster has found, has the same effect on fertility rates as increasing by five years the length of time girls stay in school.

The soaps in Brazil and India provided images of women who were empowered to make decisions affecting not only childbirth, but a range of household activities. The introduction of cable or satellite services in a village, Jensen and Oster found, goes along with higher girls' school enrollment rates and increased female autonomy. Within two years of getting cable or satellite, between 45 and 70 percent of the difference between urban and rural areas on these measures disappears. In Brazil, it wasn't just birthrates that changed as Globo's signal spread -- divorce rates went up, too.

Patricia Heaton became a regular guest in millions of peoples' living rooms as Debra Barone on the long-running comedy series, Everybody Loves Raymond, for which she won two Emmy Awards. This week, her new show, The Middle, premiered on ABC, and it is one of the funniest things I have ever seen. Ms. Heaton and I talked about her new show, her early years as a struggling actress in New York City, and how art often imitates life in this week's IAM Conversations interview.

My mother, a longtime public school librarian, is a big fan of Reading Rainbow, but when I broke the news to her that the show had been cancelled after a 26-year run, she wasn't as sad as, say, I was. "I don't think it's such a big deal; they can still show kids the reruns." So my sadness is probably a significant bit of gen-x nostalgia. But don't take my word for it ...

[T]he funding crunch is partially to blame, but the decision to end Reading Rainbow can also be traced to a shift in the philosophy of educational television programming. ... PBS, CPB and the Department of Education put significant funding toward programming that would teach kids how to read — but that's not what Reading Rainbow was trying to do. "Reading Rainbow taught kids why to read," Grant says. "You know, the love of reading — [the show] encouraged kids to pick up a book and to read."

Linda Simensky, vice president for children's programming at PBS, says that when Reading Rainbow was developed in the early 1980s, it was an era when the question was: "How do we get kids to read books?" ... Research has directed programming toward phonics and reading fundamentals as the front line of the literacy fight. Reading Rainbow occupied a more luxurious space — the show operated on the assumption that kids already had basic reading skills and instead focused on fostering a love of books.

A prescient report on the future of print news distribution, from 28 years ago. Or at least prescient-seeming: enough reasonably well-done news reports over enough time should yield at least of them turning out to have accurately predicted the future.

From a collection of tv-writer jargon. The good bit: it's cool to learn the names for all the specific dramatic and comedic turns that typical plots take. The bad news: once you start recognizing them in the wild, you can never really go back. Rob Long's brief and very funny podcast Martini Shot is another excellent source for this kind of stuff (as well as reflections on Hollywood, entertainment, and the writing life, by which he means the doing-anything-but-writing life).

“sock barrel”: a collection of roughly identical jokes all about the same thing. Pick one, cut the rest.

“hang a lantern on it”: Instead of trying to hide a script/credibility problem, address it in full measure, so it can be dealt with and discarded. “How does she break into the base?” “Hang a lantern on it, how tough it is to get the codes, but that makes her twice as cool for pulling it off.” This is often a bit of sleight-of-hand, but hell, you’re probably using it to address some—

“fridge logic”: a logic problem in the script that the average viewer would only ask themselves about, say, an hour later when they’re at the fridge getting a snack during commercials. TV is a very tight little medium time-wise, with an enormous amount of hand-waving to begin with. Often a logic problem that seems to smack you in the face because you’ve had the time to read the script, reread it, give notes, break it down, etc. is going to fly by your average—and hopefully emotionally engaged—viewer.

“Well, how’d she get from Dallas to Houston.”“Commuter flight.”“Could she make the drive to the airport in time?”“That’s fridge logic.”

Note that you’re not trying to be lazy here—you’re just dealing with the fact that every line of exposition is a line that isn’t active or particularly interesting, and you only get so many of those in 44 minutes before your show is now boring. Logically flawless, but boring.

I'd love to see the same study done with movies, which are narratively stitched together so that they'll work well uninterrupted. In that case the commercials might feel jarring, rather than palate-cleansing as they are between those tasty sitcom morsels. In any case, this would appear to be the same effect that allows fresh fruit in February (see this week's Five Questions) to get in the way of our enjoyment of fresh fruit in season.

In a plot twist worthy of Lost, it turns out that TV commercials aren’t obnoxious interruptions after all. They’re helpful interruptions, which increase your enjoyment of TV by periodically reminding you how much you’d rather be watching your favorite show.

That’s according to a new study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, which found that commercials restore a sense of novelty to TV programming by breaking up the cycle which we become bored with following what’s on the screen.

In one of several experiments, the study’s authors screened the sitcom Taxi for two groups. One group saw an episode with commercial interruptions, and the other saw an episode with no interruptions. Those who saw Taxi with commercial breaks enjoyed it more, by a decisive margin.

Think of narrative and televised sports and you'll usually call to mind pre-produced soft-focus athlete featurettes, or perhaps the verbal litany of setup and description and trivia from the commentators' box. But the real heart of the story belongs to the broadcast director...

There’s a wonderful article in the new Atlantic by Mark Bowden called “The Hardest Job in Football.” That hardest job is being the director of a television broadcast of a game. Bowden focuses on a man named Bob Fishman, whom he believes to be the best at this job, as Fishman sits in a control room before a bank of TV screens. Each screen shows what one of the many cameras scattered around the stadium is seeing, and Fishman’s job during the game is to scan that bank of screens and decide what the guy watching the game at home on his TV should be seeing at any given moment. It’s fascinating to think what cognitive skills make someone good at this. You have to be able to take in the import of an image in a millisecond — a moving image! — and, in a few milliseconds more, evaluate it in relation to all the other images you’re viewing. But can only do this well not by thinking of the intrinsic visual interest of a particular image, but rather by having in mind a narrative structure, a sense of what the game is about — and not just what it’s about in some general sense, but what it’s about at this particular moment. And that will vary according to whether a team is ahead or behind; whether they are deep in their own territory or deep in the opponents’; whether it’s near the beginning or the end of the game; even what stories have been in the news leading up to the game. The director’s narrative sense, then, needs to govern his visual sense. Fascinating stuff.

I suppose the price you pay for living in a country that doesn’t produce too much TV for its own good is that you’re forced to learn about the rest of the world. This learning shouldn’t be confused with CIA World Factbook-learning. It’s more like what you’d get from a good intercontinental love affair. At the very least, watching the satellite means being subjected to the fact that this planet is crowded and teeming with desires for every kind of stardom. Amidst them all, our little languages and preferences are the tiniest of snowflakes falling in six continents’ worth of static.

Fred Rogers testifies before a senate committee in 1969, arguing for the importance of funding for PBS :: via GOOD

I like that what Mr. Rogers brings to this testimony is not fame (it was only 1969 and his show wasn't well-known) but his simple, clear, and guileless message. I'm definitely reminded, too, of Andy's maxim that the best—indeed the only—way to change the culture is to create more of it.

Here's a popular Nigerian soap opera, produced with funding from one of my favorite NGOs, Search for Common Ground: "Developed and written by a team of young Nigerians, The Station addresses issues that have been identified as the main impediments to the country's development, including tribal violence, domestic abuse, corruption, unemployment and HIV/AIDS. About The Station The backdrop of the show is Action News, a fictional Nigerian television news station. Through the eyes of the many people that work at the station—journalists, anchors, cameramen, businesspeople—the viewer experiences the problems and conflicts that exist among Nigeria's ethnically diverse population." Other country-specific radio and tv versions of The Station currently being produced throughout Africa and the Middle East.

Thoughts on drama, production values, and collective therapy from the director of the transglobal, peripatetic Telenovela Institute, studying the effect of Latin American TV soaps in Eastern Europe and around the world.

Since the first days of the [Telenovela] institute’s research, I began to notice common patterns in the way each country related to telenovelas, and, at the same time, the way in which a country’s relationship to telenovelas revealed something unique about it. A Canadian researcher, Denise Bombardier, described it perfectly with her phrase “Give me a telenovela and I’ll give you a nation.” In general terms, however, telenovelas implement what the critic Tomás Lopez-Pumarejo (my principal theorist at the Institute) described as “the drama of the subconscious”: They are stories that revolve around ontological questions: “Where is my son?” or “Where is my love?”

There is a clear relationship in the way in which the telenovela soap operas explore the social tensions of a country and convert them into collective therapy. This process worked very well in countries that had recently emerged from communism, where people were casting about in a psychological search to deal with the class taboos that had dominated for so long. As a result, a drama centered on the impossibility of love because of social or economic obstacles was extremely powerful. Several studies of the time during which Los Ricos También Lloran was broadcast in Russia indicate that programs simultaneously broadcast from the US (such as Dallas and Dynasty) were popular but never generated the same level of interest, because Russians could not identify with the family problems of an oil millionaire in Texas. The higher production quality of those programs didn’t seem to matter either, and so companies like Televisa did not overly concern themselves with investments in production. It was the drama, the emotions worn on the sleeve, and in part the exotic settings that gave the telenovelas a special attraction.

I watch Grey’s Anatomy for the fast-paced gore and the overblown personal dramas. I watch its spin-off, Private Practice, for all that along with its thoughtful treatment of bioethical dramas – the same dramas we’re seeing in real-life hospitals and public debate.

The bioethics debate isn’t just a clinical and scientific debate or an abstract and philosophical one. It’s a debate about how to best fulfill the human longings for long life, good life, health and family. There’s all sorts of humanity mixed up in it - competing human longings and fallible human judgment deciding human life’s creation and existence. While philosophers and politicians squabble, doctors practice bioethics every day; and they don’t always have the time for debate when human life is at stake and the ethical choice isn’t clear.

Here's the promo for the third episode of the TV version of This American Life, which I've been watching now that it's up on Netflix. The full 30min. story of this painter and his models is, as one would expect from Ira Glass and Nancy Updike, fascinating and beautiful. For me it was also a welcome reminder that it isn't that hard to see the image of the outcast even in such a cringingly Caucasian representation of Jesus.